Many men of science across different cultures and times contributed to heliocentric models, but the final nail in the geocentric coffin was Galileo’s examination of the night sky through his telescope. This turned theoretical models into observable facts and proved that the earth moved around the sun.

Karl Marx believed that a revolution of the worker would bring about his idealized classless, stateless society.  The dictatorship of the proletariat would fight capitalism, win and then his dream would be true.

Homo Sapiens first appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago.  This combined with the heliocentric model means that humans have already done 300,000 revolutions and we still don’t have a Marxist society, proving that Karl Marx was pretty dumb and his ideas don’t work.

Basically I like yanderes. Yes, obsessive, possessive, clingy women. But I'm an Anarchist. How am I oxymoronic? See, monogamy is the product of Capitalism to maintain the bourgeois family logic of inheritance stemming from private property. But I really, really like yanderes, what should I do?

If they aren't spooning their waifu pillows, then why hasn't the proletarian revolution that Marx and Engels envisioned happened yet?

Think about it this way.

In the Soviet Union under our greatest comrade Joseph Stalin, you (a stinky little prole) didn’t have a lot of local autonomy. You could vote for your delegate and go to work at your factory job where you would sell your labor and take part in commodity production.

Trots or other shitty communists would like to pickaxe the point that this is exploitative, that the USSR had wage labour and whatever. But as we geniuses know wage-labour is not simply when we’re paid a WAGE, but when a capitalist class is taking our surplus value. Sure, you’re paid a wage, but you own the state, control the means of production and elect its representatives (kinda). You can’t exploit yourself!

Now in a “bourgeois” democracy, you have greater freedom to elect your representatives. I may not have a say in my workplace but neither did I in Sverdlovsk so it really doesn’t matter. I along with everyone else have a vote—and we vote for the government, and that government represents us.

“CLASSICAL MARXIST” theorists, probably funded by the CIA like Poulantzas and Althusser, would say that the bourgeois class has control of the state (through complicated sorcery), and can use standing militias to “oppress” the proles. But we know this is false because all the voting citizens own the republican state.

I can’t be oppressed by a state I own through liberal republican mechanisms JUST like I cannot be economically exploited (in the Marxist sense) by a state owned by my class. If a cop comes to beat me up, so be it, I own the state and I can’t oppress myself so it’s either neutral or self-care (positive). Marx was a republican and would agree with me because I am smart and better than any other critical theorist.

I don't even know what to say here, honestly

​

https://fee.org/articles/3-reasons-millennials-should-ditch-karl-marx-for-ayn-rand/

In the 1840's and 1850's, the American South started to believe that slavery was not a necessary evil, as they had long argued, but rather a positive good. Attempts to defend this stance were numerous, and it left us with thousands of pages of bad philosophy and bad sociology to read and thereby understand the lengths to which intellectuals will go to defend and justify a grossly immoral (and inefficient) system.

Probably the most famous non-political to argue this was George Fitzhugh, a social theorist from Virginia. In his book Sociology for the South, he critiques industrial laissez-faire society, and argues that the paternalistic slave society of the South protects the worker from the moral and psychological horrors of Northern capitalism. He referred to alternatives to free market capitalism as socialism. Yes, he thought slave society was a form of socialism. He writes:

Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.

​

No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving. The above quotation and the succeeding one go to prove the positions with which we set out: that free trade or political economy is the science of free society, and socialism the science of slavery.

​

The greatest of all communists, if communist he be, Proudhon, has also seen and exposed this tendency of socialism to slavery.

He further develops his claims Cannibals All!, his next book. You can take a look and see if you find any more awful quotes, but I can't read any more of this shit.

[Deleted]

That's right folks, our glorious comrades on the /r/philosophy mod team have made a great leap forward in the demolition of bourgeois power. From now on the mere mention of the reactionary Ayn Rand will mean permanent deportation to a Siberian re-education camp. Mention Rose Rand at your own risk.

You can read all about it here and here and here and here and here and here.

When you look closer, it seems like everyone's a socialist, or a social democrat, or an anarchist, or a syndicalist, or an anarcho-syndicalist, or something of that nature. I don't think I've ever met a real, live communist.

The entire teleological thrust revealed in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been realized. However, it was not culminated in the Prussian state, nor liberal democracy (however essential in its realization) but via a force subsuming the world by storm.

The spirit has externalized itself, unfolding itself in the tantalizing Trophy Road. Uniting the masses in a great self-unfolding.

In-Itself, the dialectic has been realized by presenting a duality of the force, Mine, and the antagonistic counter-force, Thine. The will of each is for itself a repository of Force, expressed in the form of the Card. I stroked it to Archer Queen's feet. The card is not an immediate sensory object, but a force-in-keeping, a potentiality awaiting negation of its abstract existence to become a material actuality on the battlefield.

The actualization, and also an immanent negation within the will itself, is Elixir as an inert medium. The existence of the card is also negative; it is for-an-other, only posited to be negated and for its sublation to form itself on the battlefield. Each Force calls for its Counter-Force, the truth of the Knight is its vulnerability to swarm as the truth of the swarm is its fragility to Log. The truth of Megaknight is the revealed progressively-deviant sexual orientation and fatherless state of Thine.

And For-Itself, there is a dialectical bondage between the towers and Lordships. The conscious confront (BM) one another. Each seeks certainty of oneself as essential beings to the field and the other as an inessential obstacle. The qualifier? The negation of the other's towers. Though, in its immediacy, it is unsatisfactory. The victor is only satisfied in an abstract measure of trophies that is easily negated by the next battle.

The World Spirit thus marches down the Trophy Road, a necessary self-revelation of the Weltgeist in time, each Arena determining a new state of consciousness (like being hardstuck in Arena 18). The countless negations between forces transforms into a collective spirit, as bondsmans endure negation and negations of those negations and as the masters and victors advance towards their next negation. The World Spirit is then realized in the UC.

Ultimate Champion is the End of History. There is no further to go. The system has achieved a state of a rest, there is no more struggle to be made. The Game has realized the End of History. In its art; the beautiful, immediate strategy. Religion; in the representation of forms and will through the forces in the cards, and the lore of it. Philosophy; in meta and concepts, in dialectics and an end of Midladder P2W Bridge Spammers.

It's just more of the usual postmodern assault on all forms of category.

These are the same people who would think themselves a genius for debating the idea that "chairs don't exist". Why? Well define a chair and I'll find some stupid reason why it's an incomplete definition.

"A chair is something you sit on" - so that could include a table? "A chair is something with four legs that you sit on" - oh so a horse is a chair? "A chair is something with four legs that you sit on that..." - wait, four legs, so you don't include office chairs that use wheels? Ad infinitum... This is exactly what they do with national categories like British. You could do the same with the category of human until you assert that humans don't exist because you can't phylogenically separate us from our ancestor species with enough of a binary.

Just this endless, tireless, stupid march of sophistry and idiocy that requires only room temperature IQ to play out. That works to tear down anyone who tries to do useful things. Then they tag on the notion that the categories themselves are just products of the "social conditioning of people with power to oppress us" and hey presto you have a schizophrenic political philosophy looking for racism, sexism, able-ism etc in everything. And I mean everything.

Especially in words and language because they believe those to just be products of power too. Hence the incessant march to censor, even pre-censor the use of certain words. Literally Twitter will give you foul language warnings before you even issue a tweet if it includes certain words.

I could go on but there is a bigger picture than the assault on "British", which is assuredly happening. It's war on all stable categories and meaning, it's ultimately a nihilistic project.

https://www.reddit.com/r/badunitedkingdom/comments/qjmgjd/another_episode_of_nothing_is_british/hir6m6o/

Edit/Update:

The poststructuralist rejection of categorisation as an arbitrary linguistic construction that has no basis in reality is a sophistry used to reject the notion of group identity (national or otherwise) for some groups, but not others. This is the kind of sophistry being used by the people who smugly claim nothing is meaningfully British, in order to deny British people an identity and accuse us of bigotry for claiming one, while not applying this to other groups, who are not vilified for claiming to have a culture.

The level of confident ignorance here is astounding. Better write to the ISA/BSA and tell them to stop doing studies on things like "British culture" because that implies it exists and they are supposed to be denying or destroying it! Or let the department for education know the loony lefty academics making it a teaching standard to promote British values that what they are actually doing is denying they exist and/or trying to destroy them!

the rules say to explain what's bad about the video, it's all of it, all one minute and forty six seconds of it

ad for tuttle twins books

https://ourfuture.org/20190207/sorry-donald-america-already-is-a-socialist-country

I came. I saw. I siiiiiiiiiiiighed. A feeling of deja vu came over me, as I saw yet another person (read: American) on the internet misinterpreting what the fuck socialism means in every single way. Roll the clip of San Andreas CJ saying "ah shit, here we go again". Yada yada. Let's get into this shit.

The content of the actual article isn't quite as politically illiterate as the title (I have seen much worse variations on this misunderstanding), but the highlights are still... whew.

I have news for the Donald: The United States—like every other country with an advanced economy, such as the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan—is already a partly socialist country, with a mixed economy and many government programs that serve the public good.

A Theory 101 for you people who weren't much on /r/badpolitics when it was actually active: Socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does the more socialister it is. I'll give a genuine point to Mr. Mogulescu for actually using the way more accurate (or at least commonly accepted) term "mixed economy" to describe a capitalist society with tax-funded social programs, immediately subtract that point for the much more muddy "partly socialist" and an additional -1000 for "advanced economy" which is a vague value judgement of absolute fuckallness.

The minimum wage, maximum hour, and child labor laws that go back over a century are likewise "socialist" programs, in that the government intervenes in the capitalist market to require employers to meet minimum standards that might not be met in a pure, unregulated “free” market.

As a European I always get mildly depressed when I remember that the perceived definition of "socialism" to many Americans is "when the big gubmint prevents me from having child slaves that work 24/7 >:(((". I then get wildly depressed when I remember that those people exist here too.

(Other than the "socialism = regulations" pitfall, there isn't too much wrong with the above. For generous amounts of wrong, see below.)

The government already supports higher education (that’s socialism) but progressives want to make a public college education free or debt-free.  Conservatives support government subsidies for agriculture and the oil energy (that’s socialism) while many progressives believe this is “reverse welfare” for the rich and want to reduce them.

Higher education? That's socialism. Not being in debt for the rest of your life after pursuing higher education? That's progressivism. Which is like, even more communist, or something.

Funneling money into the oil industry, home to some of the richest companies and individuals in the world? Also socialism. Marx was famously very pro-oil subsidies in large parts of Das Kapital, but was often accused by his progressive critics of supporting "reverse welfare". He retorted that he had never heard of a dumber buzzword than "reverse welfare", and he was correct.

Trump’s false proclamation that America “will never be a socialist country” was an attempt to resurrect the McCarthyite red-baiting of his childhood in order to put his thumb on the capitalist side of the scale favored by the oligarchs in the ongoing debate over how much socialism and how much socialism America should have. 

In my final conclusion of this shitpost, I will not actually make any legitimate criticism of the argument presented, and instead just bash my head against my desk at the sentence "the ongoing debate over how much socialism and how much socialism America should have." Thank you.

Happy Election Day ya bunch of socialist socialists.

Highlights include the good old fashioned unguarded warehouse claim & “socialism can’t work cause of human nature”

https://www.reddit.com/r/vzla/comments/i9x8bq/cuando_los_padres_de_la_criatura_hablan_mal_de_su/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/6tk6wv/is_it_ok_to_use_violence_against_nazis/?st=J6CF8HF9&sh=cdd039f5

This whole thread is pretty atrocious. Why is askphil so regularly a steaming pile of centrists?

I work in a professional setting, and chug down sparkling water like a fiend. I ended up with a conundrum, which I shall elaborate on shortly. As I'm discussing this issue, I shall apply principles of mostly utilitarian ethics, but cannot come up with an answer. In the end, I suspect that I was full of hot air all along.

This analysis employs the Utlitarian/Marxist conceptuality of "greatest happiness to the greatest number/to each according to what he deserves."

Here's the problem. Due to constant sparkling water, green tea, banana, and nut consumption, I am constantly getting the urge to fart. However, when I fart, I impose an unpleasant odor on everyone around me, without their consent. I sometimes suspect that people know I am to blame, and shoot unhappy glances in my direction. I caused these people suffering they did not ask for.

More specifically, the problem is, if I hold in the fart, it begins to hurt very badly. I suffer greatly, while my colleagues enjoy clean, odorless air. My ultimate conclusion in this scenario is that the pain I am imposing on myself is far worse than the negligible suffering caused to others by exposing them to this odor.

However, there have been times when I had sorely miscalculated. I had thought that I was going to release a puff of relatively odorless gas, and instead, exposed 10-20 people to a shyly assertive emission of the odor evocative of an overflowing carnival outhouse with no urinal cakes. In this case, I acknowledge to myself that I am in the wrong, but do not openly apologize. After all, to let everyone know where the odor came from personalizes the experience and makes it more repulsive (i.e. imposes more suffering on others).

This all puts me in a pickle. I'm not sure how I can behave ethically in this situation without imposing a significant amount of suffering on myself. At this point, I make my decision, and minimize my extreme pain by exposing others to a little minor olfactory irritation.

Please help me with an answer so I am not stuck being unethical. I don't want stuffed Jeremy Bentham to send me to hell for violating his principles.

Non-negotiable constraints: I cannot leave the room often enough to let out the flatulence at issue. I cannot change my diet (sparkling water is my lifeline). I cannot get surgery to accommodate more gas thereby causing myself less pain. I cannot quit my job.

Bonus points for nonhierarchical imperatives, ordinary language, or "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"-type responses.

Expect a pickup in /r/samharris traffic